regions 0.1.3 is on CRAN

regions is released on CRAN. This package helps creating data time series and data panels for sub-national, i.e. regional, provincial, federal state, county and other lower level data.

While we often take the stability of national boundaries for granted, just within the EU there are almost 2000 regional boundaries, and dozens change every three years. Globally, there are tens of thousands of provinces, states, counties, regions, parishes and other areas that may be used for statistical purposes, with hundreds of changes annually. Joining data from Google and Eurostat, from U.S. statistics and OECD is an absolute nightmare, partly because the ISO standard for lower level administration is extremely ill-suited for statistical applications due to its poor metadata structure.

For European data tables made since 1999, not so much anymore. We have encoded thousands of European region versions, and hundreds used by Google to allow the creation of far more detailed statistical analysis that nationally aggregated data would allow.